AdmiNirvana

I have been itching to get Time Machine to work over a (unsupported) network-shared volume since we’re unwilling to drop the cash for a Time Capsule.  I’ve seen quite a few different posts on how to get it done, including the terminal trick to tell Time Machine to use unsupported volumes, but none of them quite worked.

The best I could get was Time Machine to begin to write the files to the share, but after a few seconds die with a vague “Backup disk could not be created error”.  This stumped me for a bit until I came across this.  Apparently sometime around 10.5.2, Apple introduced a new, undocumented “feature” to Time Machine that causes it to fail over network volumes when doing the initial backup.   However, once the files are created it will work fine.

So, the magical combination is as follows:

• CentOS 5 with Netatalk-2.0.3 compiled, installed, and configured per this post.  Note: I also had to modify etc/cnid_dbd/dbif.c with the same code change as specified there, but YMMV.
• OS X Leopard, patched to 10.5.4.
• Changes to Netatalk’s netatalk.conf file per this post at the Gentoo Wiki.
• Following the post linked above precisely.

Once that happened, Time Machine has begun to work great over AFP to our backup volume–even for multiple Macs connecting to the same share. Behold!

It probably doesn’t need saying; but this is clearly an unsupported way to use Time Machine.  It has been running this way for me only about a day.    If you’re concerned about having to troubleshoot problems that may pop up down the road, especially regarding backups; picking up a Time Capsule is probably a far better idea.

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